Hack The Music

Inspiration

Our team has a passion for music. Some of us have been creating music for a large part of our lives. After reading articles from Harvard Health that describe how music can heal, we decided to use new technology to build a music mobile experience. We were able to branch off of our idea and make a higher quality experience for VR users as well. This way owners of a HTC vive can enjoy this unique music experience as well. Hitting both our stretch goals has made the project very rewarding!

What it does

We used open source sound projects and analytical technology to extract key information about a piece of music. We take a song and essentially split up the different parts of the track. This allows us to map key frequencies or amplitudes to different objects in a VR environment. The experience we are trying to create is meant to be therapeutic as well as relaxing for the user. We want to eventually take this into a more interactive environment.

How we built it

We used unity and various song analysis algorithms to map out an engaging environment for users to immerse in. Our code base is mostly C#. We also have a touch of other languages. We used these technologies so that we can implement our experience in a the Windows Market. We have various types of talent on our team. We have artists, music producers, and software engineers on our team. This has helped us build a unique experience that none of us could accomplish alone.

Challenges we ran into

We had the trouble of not doing anything VR related prior to the competition. Setting up the Vive in a comfortable area took a lot of time. Having no VR professionals around made it easy to get stuck in situations that would have been solved by having that. Nevertheless the team stayed happy and we got our project done! We also had trouble tackling the music analysis at first. By strategically combining API's and extraction techniques we were able to get useful data out of a music track.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to use our various talents to make a finished project. Usually at hackathons we don't see a way to move a project forward, but we have been proud of our invention and we hope that having a usable cardboard build will allows us to reach a good amount of users.

What we learned

We learned how VR works!! YES! We also learned how to analyze music in a algorithmic level. We were also able to learn how to work together as a team of diverse individuals. We believe that the the greatest reward that came out of the project is having the outcome of a working together successfully!

What's next for Hack The Music

We are building a finished mobile version to port. We are also going to polish our HTC build. Our goal is to partner with Microsoft and take this experience to the next level!

Created by

I composed the Music and created the SoundFX onsite for our VR Experience. I learned to collaborate with a group to create a collective vision, taking feedback and opinions of all team members to create something amazing. Also learned a lot more about VR and Unity from working with my teammates.